Amy Kravitz

Amy Kravitz was born in 1956 in Wilmington, Delaware. At a summer creative arts
program, she started making films when she was eleven years old and began
teaching at age fourteen. She
studied Anthropology at Harvard University where she received an AB, and
studied Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts where she received
an MFA.

Her films have won many awards and have screened throughout
the world. Her film “Trap” was
considered by Jules Engel to be one of the ten essential films through which to
teach the principles, techniques and concepts of the art of animation.

Over four decades of teaching
experience have enabled her to develop unusual teaching methods. Her methods encourage students to
develop individual approaches to the medium. Her classes explore animation as a
distinct language that employs unusual materials, unique spatial expressions
and visual metaphors as its grammar.
In 2011 she received the Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Academic research/ areas of interest

Amy’s animated films
transform the vicarious phenomena of cinema into genuine emotional
experience. She explores timing,
abstraction, metaphor and kinesthesia to communicate on a visceral level.